Die Veranstaltung findet im Rahmen der Reihe "Current Issues in Ancient Studies" statt.

Im Anschluss an den Vortrag und die Diskussion laden wir zu einem Umtrunk ein und bitten um Anmeldung bis zum 05. Juni unter: sekretariat@berliner-antike-kolleg.org

Abstract

Triangular Memory: W. E. B. Du Bois, Hannah Arendt, and Classical Antiquity Classicists often claim that the otherness of the Greek and Roman past helps us to think through enduringly divisive issues at a remove from present passions and partisan politics: the ancient serves to illuminate the now. This lecture begins from the opposite point of view. My contention is that modern disputes over the public significance of historical violence offer a model of reading that is particularly well-suited for understanding classical antiquity; more precisely, this model explains why classical antiquity mattered so much to its most creative and most controversial readers and why their readings still matter for us today. I draw on approaches from cultural memory studies to analyze encounters with ancient texts in the work of W. E. B. Du Bois, a Black American writer, sociologist, and civil rights activist, and Hannah Arendt, a German Jewish refugee, essayist, and political theorist, and to explore the complex triangulation between Black Americans, German Jews, and Greco-Roman antiquity. While both Du Bois and Arendt belonged to marginalized communities in western culture, they nonetheless find in the supposed origins of that culture essential resources to confront the challenges posed by and for a public sphere in a plural world.